“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” 

- Anais Nin

Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychology is a powerful yet gentle, experiential, body-centered methodology. It offers an elegant, effective, and mindfulness-based approach to psychological change and growth.

Hakomi practitioners use the body as a doorway to the psyche.

A great deal of human communication is nonverbal, and yet the wealth of information that the body communicates is rarely used as a healing tool. Hakomi practitioners bring clients’ attention to subtle somatic cues (such as facial expressions, breathing, postures, and movement patterns) that indicate the presence of unconscious psychological material. Instead of making educated guesses or interpretations about what’s motivating people’s behavior, Hakomi uses the body’s somatic cues as a roadmap that allows clients to gently activate, study, and transform the actual neural networks producing unwanted behavior and beliefs.

For over 40 years, Hakomi has pioneered the dynamic use of mindfulness in the healing process.

Due in part to Hakomi’s influence, many therapeutic approaches now use mindfulness to calm and self-regulate their clients. However, Hakomi is one of the only healing methods that uses mindfulness to access unconscious psychological material that’s not easily accessible by conversation alone. People are often surprised at how quickly they can access deeply unconscious material using the mindfulness-based methods that infuse every phase of our work.

Hakomi is grounded in cutting-edge neuroscience.

In recent years, neuroscience has made breakthrough discoveries validating many foundational aspects of Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychology, including the effectiveness of mindfulness, loving presence, empathic attunement, limbic resonance, and memory reconsolidation. Hakomi’s pioneering methods supported memory reconsolidation, neuroplasticity, and other aspects of neural transformation decades before these psychological processes were widely known or understood.

Hakomi works with expanded states of consciousness.

Learning to more deeply embody expanded states of consciousness like mindfulness and loving presence allows clients to develop an even deeper sensitivity, presence, and sense of safety and connection to themselves and others. 

To find out more about Hakomi, visit the website of the International Hakomi Institute.